Fonality Targets Midmarket with PBXtra Professional Edition

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November 6, 2006 @ 14:40

Fonality, a developer of Asterisk-based IP telephony systems, today announced the release of its new PBXtra Professional Edition IP PBX and Heads-Up Display (HUD) Team application, which targets mid-market companies (50-500 seats) at 40 percent to 80 percent less cost than a traditional solution. The system is available for sale through Fonality dealers.

PBXtra Professional Edition includes all the features in PBXtra Standard Edition, such as telecommuting, branch office support, voice-mail-to-e-mail, click-to-call, VoIP, softphones and support for IP and analog phones. It adds more advanced call- management capabilities, such as O, zone paging, zone intercom across the Aastra and Polycom phone lines, NPA/NPX call routing and unlimited party conference bridge.

It also offers the ability to build groups of employees and assign them permissions. Fonality CEO Chris Lyman says this capability becomes important as companies become larger and start creating departments with roles in relation to other departments. One example of a permission-based capability is recording. Management wants the capability to record calls made by support personnel, but does not want support personnel to record its calls, he said. Another example is assigning paging authority to managers but not their staff members.

HUD Team, Fonalitys new universal contact management application, provides companywide visibility and interaction with every employee from the desktop whether they use Windows or Mac OS. HUD Team includes secure enterprise chat, cell phone integration and employee presence management.

PBXtra Professional Edition and HUD Team are available immediately with unlimited seat licenses priced at $1,995 and $995, respectively. Lyman said the pricing includes the cost of the server, which can handle concurrent calls up to a T1-equivalent capacity. CPUs and RAM need only to be added to increase the number of possible simultaneous calls.

Fonality supports phones from Polycom, Cisco, Aastra, Counterpath and eyebeam Pro. Dealers source preconfigured phones through Fonality until they reach premium status at which point they can buy direct from the manufacturer or distributor and configure them using Fonalitys software.

Lyman said Fonality is building its customer base, which numbers 1,300, with an inbound direct sales team and is actively is seeking distribution partners. It currently has about 2,000 with 10 percent on the active roster. Lyman said the company is signing resellers at the rate of 150 per month.

While he said the program is geared more toward data VARs with an understanding of routers, the program includes forward leaning interconnects that are learning the data components of the network.

Commissions on software and hardware, Lyman said, are about 30 percent and are based on volume.

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